ASP.Net SignalR 2.4.0 is due later this year; Azure SignalR Service currently is in beta. It is an Azure cloud-managed service that can be used to develop capabilities such as chat rooms, instant broadcasting, and IoT dashboards. Developers using the service do not have to deal with hosting, authentication, scaling, or load-balancing.

To migrate apps to Azure SignalR Service, users will need to update their servers and clients to ASP.Net SignalR 2.4.0. Once an application is using the service, the server application no longer has to manage all the individual connections. Users also wil no longer need a scale-out system such as Redis, Service Bus, or SQL Server.

SignalR itself is an abstraction over techniques used to build real-time web applications. While WebSockets is the optimal transport, other techniques such as Server-Sent Events and Long Polling are used when other options are not available. SignalR detects the appropriate transport based on what is supported on the server and client.